Geeking weekend preparing for Snow Leopard ...

While this weekend has involved great geeking with my Macs it was preceded by far more geek thought and concern. I blame it on/credit it to a couple of podcasts that I've been listening to for quite some time now; Adam Christianson's MacCast and The Mac Observer's Mac Geek Gab. I never used to worry about loosing data or machines getting fried from nearby lightening strikes, but a couple of months ago it began to creep into my nightmares.

You see, I"m a hoarder of data. I have the results of high school chemistry experiments, still have all the different versions of my final year degree project. Every CV I've had to write is still there, along with the letter of application for a years placement at CERN (I have the rejection letter in a file on a shelf somewhere too). However I always had a backup strategy of holding multiple copies of this archive on multiple PCs.

Then I moved to the Mac, and for a while I still had the drives and some of the PCs holding my archive, but eventually it just came down to bare drives that hadn't been used for years. I grabed myself a USB Drive adapter and copied the whole archive onto my iMac. At that point I had one single copy on one single drive. Then all I would hear in my head were the horror stories written in to the podcasts I mentioned. The constant advice of having multiple copies of everything.

When I upgraded to Leopard I bought a Maxtor 500GB external drive for Time Machine, which I thought should be enough to cope with my internal 300GB drive. After 3 months it start erroring on account of the fact that it was full. Time Machine dutifully started deleting old copies of things and I began to worry again. Finally I caved and bought a 1TB WD MyBook drive for Time Machine and then bought a copy of SuperDuper! to use the Maxtor for a bootable clone of my main drive.
Finally my mind could rest about only having a single copy of my data, I could handle 2 potential drive failures. At last restful sleep ... but of course not. My mind moved onto the next possible crisis, fried computer and all 3 drives(!) from a power spike, triggered by both the podcasts and the, getting more often, small power failures in our area. After a good search and taking advice from KC I've settled on the APC Back-up ES 700VA.

But that is for next month, this months tech concern is about the imminent release of Mac OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard. For those that don't know, and are interested, there is quite a large set of unknowns about this next release of OSX. Apple has stated that it will be primarily an update to the internals of OSX, with few new visible features. This is a platform for future releases, but as such is almost certain to be an Intel only release.

Traditionally Apple removes the previous version of OSX from sale when the new one is available. If this happens with Snow Leopard then what are those people who have yet to update their PowerPC machine to Leopard to do? This was my concern, we still have the little iBook G4 which Carly uses a lot.

Of course, and I'm sure that this is no coincidence, Apple has recently released the new versions of iWork and iLife and made them available in a set with Leopard, the Mac Boxed Set, at an incredibly reasonable price. All together this works out really well, I'm a version behind on iLife and 2 on iWork. So I got the set, iLife and iWork for my iMac and another Leopard license for the iBook.

Before installing Leopard on the iBook though a little surgery was required, it only had the built in 256MB of RAM. A quick order from the wonderful people at Crucial, and a 1GB chip was in my hands (1.25 GB being the max on that machine). Using the instructions from iFixIt the installation was a breeze, and I finally figured out a use for OSX's CTRL+Mouse Wheel screen zoom (instructions on the 24" iMac across the room as the printer is out of ink).

While Leopard was installing I installed iLife and iWork on the iMac, now all is good. A great geek weekend, now I just have to wait till next month and the APC UPS and maybe I can relax ...

It's alive! ...

Finally the day arrived. That day was last Thursday. That day was the day my new iMac arrived. Those that follow this blog will know that I made the switch to Mac back in 2005. That was after a brief and totally unsuccessful flirtation with Linux for the year prior to that.

My switch came in the form of an iBook G4, the cheapest Mac available at that time. I knew the rumours were flying about the move to Intel chips, but I still felt that I needed to dip my toe into the Apple world and test the waters. People who know me will tell you that I am now a complete Apple bore.

Yet it is hard to be an Apple bore when you can only show a really slow, 256Mb RAM, 3 generations old processor laptop. Frankly it's been a little embarrassing. I came close to buying a 24" iMac earlier in the year, but then certain financial constraints stopped me, and then more rumours about an iMac refresh started circling. So I waited. But now I wait no more



All I can say is "Wow!". This is such a leap in performance from my previous machine that any comparison would be meaningless, but wow all the same.

Figuring that this one should last me quite a while I went all out. It's a 2.8 GHz Core 2 Duo Extreme with 4Gb of Ram. Looking at Activity Monitor I am yet to get even close to making it have to do anything stressful.

I am also happy to report that I ave managed to get someone I work with to switch too, and it was the new iMacs that did it. She could not believe that Apple have managed to squeeze such a powerful machine into the monitor.

Right now I am finding and installing all those little apps that are so important yet you forget that they are not part of the core system; Adium, Stuffit, Wire Tap, etc. Feels like home already :)

Big apologies to the guys from my old work that were meeting up last Thursday, I had been offline for a while and didn't get the messages till late in the day and then found out I had to go pick up the Mac and well, you can understand I'm sure.

Update ...

Rolling

Here are the latest graphs from our weekly rolling sessions.

3 Game Average
4 Week Moving Average

After a great week the week before you can see that some scores dropped off again. Still, I am keeping up with Onepin which is more than could be said a few months ago.

Life

The big news is that a little while back Carly and I got engaged! Something that I know many of you (or most if not all of you) thought would never happen. We had hoped to arrange a small wedding before the end of the year, both of us would like a Christmas wedding, but finding a venue and arranging things while so much else is going on just doesn't seem to be happening. We may well have to wait till next year. Still, gives my best man plenty of time to work out a stag party and write his speech.

One of the other things going on is that we are moving flat, not far. In fact we are moving to a flat about 100 yards from my first London flat. It's somewhere a little smaller, to try to save on rent and other expenses, but most importantly it has central heating and does not have the worlds freakiest neighbours (will tell you all about them another time).

Cats

I had the week off this week, simply because I had plenty of holiday to use before the end of November and it worked well for my current project at work that I take time off around now. Carly has spent most of the week up in Birmingham for a conference. It was lucky that I was around because I came home Tuesday night from rolling to find Dylan in a terrible state. After a quick taxi ride to the 24 hour Veterinary hospital near here (another good reason not to move to far away) I was told that she had a tooth infection which had obviously got so painful for her that she had been chewing on something really hard and cracked the tooth. She was clawing at her mouth when I had got home.

She had to stay in for a couple of nights because she was put under general anesthetic for an operation to remove the tooth. I am happy to report that other than looking a little silly (they shaved her chest and right leg for heart monitor and IV drip) she is home and doing fine.

Geekness

At some point soon I will bring myself to follow up on my overly optimistic post about the (at the time upcoming) WWDC Keynote. I wasn't as let down as most people, I think for once the keynote was perfectly pitched at it's primary audience, developers. Again I enjoyed it from work, a couple of computers following the MacRumoursLive and Engadget coverage while also listening to someone's live UStream audio feed.

One thing I must comment on, the release of Safari for Windows. There are many silly people out there hoping for this to be a lead into more Apple software on Windows, or even people buying into the Steve line about gaining more market share for Safari. It's all a load of crap. There is only one reason Apple released Safari for Windows and that is because they were forced to. By making the iPhone development environment web based apps only they had to release Safari for Windows so people could test their applications. That's it, the only reason.

Speaking of the iPhone, I followed the geekiest launch queue (in Palo Alto) through Kristopher Tate and Zooomr TV's live UStream feed. Looks like much fun was had by all (including an appearance by Steve himself). Cannot wait for the iPhone to be released over here, so long as the rumours about no 3G are not true.

End of the new beginning...

This year's Apple World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) is possibly going to be the most important in the history of the company. It will draw a line under 2 years of some success tempered by the big Intel shift and it will offer a fresh start for the company.

Many of you will disagree with the above statement. You might say that the move to Intel happened way ahead of schedule and lines have already been drawn under that period. Some will suggest that the fresh start came long ago with the return of Jobs or the release of the iPod. However, when the history of this time is written I believe that it will all be seen as time of rebuilding, all the way to the 11th of June, 2007. To understand this we need to first look back a couple of years.

On the 6th of June 2005, during his WWDC Keynote speech, Steve Jobs finally announced what everyone knew was coming. That Apple would be transitioning away from the PowerPC chip architecture to Intel. At the time the official line said Apple were aiming to complete this transition by the end of 2007. The first fruits of this roadmap came with the release of the Intel based MacBook Pro and iMac on the 10th of January 2006 at MacWorld Expo.

The Mini and MacBook followed, along with several updates to all the Intel based machines throughout the year. Until at the next WWDC Keynote on the 7th of August 2007 when the last of the Macs, Mac Pro and XServe, were finally released as Intel based computers. During that presentation it was highlighted several times that;

“Apple has successfully completed the transition to using Intel processors in just seven months—210 days to be exact,”

Of course this is perfectly good marketing speak, especially only starting the clock from the release of the first Intel based computer and not the first official announcement, but it doesn't tell the whole truth. If that were the case then there wouldn't have been a large group of Apple's most lucrative customers holding out until only just recently. For the whole truth we must also look at the software side of things.

During that first official announcement of the move to Intel back at WWDC '05, Steve Jobs revealed that Apple had been running OSX on Intel hardware from the beginning, benefiting from the flexibility of NextStep, OSX's ancestor. Apple obviously had the upper hand when it came to putting out software for Intel Macs. Apple's iLife and iWork software suites were released alongside the first Intel Mac hardware, as well as sundry utilities that come with OSX Tiger. Also released were two key technologies, Rosetta and Universal Binaries, which would be the key to ensuring a swift and successful transition.

Rosetta emulates the old PowerPC architecture, allowing software that has not yet been updated to run on new Intel based Macs. This ensured that the new machines had plenty of software to run on them, removing that as a barrier to ourchase. The only issue is (as with any emulation layer) the software run on Rosetta runs slowly. The faster Intel chips helped to lessen the impact of this, but it has remained an issue ever since. Still, Rosetta has, and will remain for some time to come, a key part of the transition strategy.

The idea behind Universal Binaries is that developers can very easily create a single version of an application that will run on both PowerPC and Intel based Macs. Most of the code in an application can happily be shared between the two platforms and the Universal Binary format takes care of managing the small amount of code that is specific to one platform or the other. This technology enabled developers to easily port their applications to the new machines whilst not alienating the vast majority of users who were still using PowerPC based machines.

The Apple third party Universal Applications list now counts over 6000 applications, so this must have been a success. Indeed, small and open source developers had Universal Binaries of their applications out within weeks. But it was always going to be the big developers, with the star attraction applications, that would take longest to migrate. Apple again used their advantage and showed the way with the early release of Final Cut Studio as a Universal Binary on the 30th of March 2006. Quark too joined the fray early with the release of version 7 on the 7th of August 2006. But to many of Apple's key customers, these were not the applications they were looking for, what these people wanted, and would hold out for, was Adobe's Creative Suit and Microsoft Office.

For both of these companies the transition to Intel based Macs could not have come at a worse time. Microsoft was battling to get Windows Vista and the accompanying version of Windows Office out of the door as quickly as possible. They were never going to sort out a Mac version of Office before this happened.

Things at Adobe were even worse. Their key application Photoshop is probably one of the most complex, non operating system, code bases around. With many platform specific optimisations it was going to be a hard job to re-code. On top of that add in the rest of Creative Suite and then on top of all that they merged with Macromedia, taking most of their products into Creative Suite as well.

The key Apple customers I keep talking about are the business customers, especially in the creative world. These people would not, and could not, upgrade to Intel based Macs until there was a top end machine (enter the Mac Pro) and at least Adobe CS. MS Office was a little less of an issue as the previous version runs okay under Rosetta emulation, but Photoshop does not. In almost every article even mentioning Rosetta or Intel Macs, the Photoshop issue was always raise. In fact you will be hard pushed to find a review of an Intel Mac (beside the Mini) which does not talk about Photoshop and the fact that if it is important to you, you should wait for a Universal Binary version.

Finally on the 27th of March 2007 Adobe released Creative Suite 3, including Universal Binaries for Mac. Not only was this good news in the form of their existence, but CS3 is a watershed release for Adobe, and therefore Apple. The inclusion of Macromedia's software portfolio, tightly integrated with the traditional CS tools, makes the whole far more powerful. But beyond that this release sees something quite unexpected, a Video Production suite including the return of Adobe Premier to the Mac. This is a massive vote of confidence in the future of the Mac platform and adds competition and variety which can only benefit users.

Microsoft Mac Office 2008 is not far away now too, almost a slam dunk for the Intel transition. This is why I suggested that the June WWDC this year will be such a turning point for Apple, because they can put all of this behind them. No longer will every review of new hardware talk about the lack of Photoshop or Word in native code. Finally everyone can look to the future of Apple, the fact that they run on Intel will no longer be worth mentioning. What better timing than this to release Leopard to the world, and have that be every one's focus, without any distractions.

From the 11th of June 2007 Leopard will be the story, if people want to bring Photoshop into it, it might be to wonder when Adobe will release a 64bit version to match Leopard's top to tail 64bit software stack. Soon after we should begin to see radically new Mac hardware. No need to hide an Intel chip in PowerPC clothing now. The June WWDC Keynote is going to be big, very big, and I am very jealous of anyone who gets to go. I will be here in good old Blighty reading the live blog feeds from MacRumors, Engadget and TUAW whilst history unfolds.

18 months with a Mac ...

It is now 18 months since I bought an Apple Mac , a 12" iBook to be precise. At the time it had been a little under a year since making the move to Linux, but that had not turned out how I had hoped. No regrets though, despite the investment in a new PC and a copy of Suse, I am still glad that I gave it a go so that I know that Linux isn't the desktop OS for me.

Looking back on that period it was definitely more of a move "from Microsoft" than towards anything specific at first, and I had long held reservations about Apple and their OS, actually OS 9 and before. The ideals of Open Source attracted me, but in the end the pain of managing my computer more than using it just proved too much, and through all my learning of Linux I kept coming across people saying wonderful things about Apple.

In June of 2005 I caved, and on a bit of a whim one evening after work I went to the Apple Store in Regents Street and plunked down the cash. Not too much though, this was an exercise in toe dipping after all. So I went for the most basic, and therefore cheap, model I could. The 12" iBook, with no extras.

In some ways it was the perfect decision. It is still the only laptop I have ever owned (not counting the one my current work make me lug around), and being the 12" model it is suitably tiny. It now sits in the lounge, somewhere near the sofa, in sleep mode so that when I want to get online I simply reach down to grab it and flip open the lid. Immediately it wakes up and connects to the wireless network and is ready to go, something that I still find fascinating coming from the sleep-mode-hobbled Windows world.

The one thing that I would have done differently, given the chance, would have been to add a little more memory when getting it. 256MB is simply not enough for me, too many apps open at any one time. But now it never quite seems worth adding more because this machine should be relegated to simple browsing once I finally get a new iMac.

Ah yes, the iMac. As you can see I am now completely sold on Apple Macs. Toes have been sufficiently dipped and the waters found to be lovely. Much as I would like to own a super-duper Mac Pro with 32" CinemaHD monitors there is no way I could ever afford such a luxury. For a time this was the cause of some dilemma for me as the original Intel iMac just did not seem like enough. Dutifully Apple read my mind and released the wonderful 24" iMac which nicely occupies the middle ground between the base iMacs and the Mac Pro machines. My purchase is now only on hold for bonus time, the inclusion of Leopard and any possible announcements of new hardware in the coming weeks/months.

My conversion is very much complete, I know this because I find myself being a Mac evangelist to everyone who engages me in any form of computer related discussion, much to the annoyance of my co-workers. This did not start as a conscious thing either, I just found myself espousing the wonders of Mac again and again. Not the rabid, foaming at the mouth faithful, sort of rant that some people do, just simply recounting anecdotes of how much easier my dealings are with my Mac above any PC I have ever owned (and there have been quite a few).

I think part of this sense of a need to convert others comes from being in a minority. The innate understanding in the human mind, the animal instinct, that safety comes from numbers and that by converting more people to Macs we will ensure that they continue. That more users means more and better software that again pushes the hardware that again attracts more users. It is exciting to be involved in something near the start of this virtuous circle. At least I hope that is where we are at.

Looking back it is hard to believe that it has only been 18 months. In that time I can say I have only begun to appreciate the change. There are far more changes to come for my relationship with Macs. I am already behind the curve (in fact two curves) by having a G4 powered Mac. The move to an Intel powered iMac will be a major change in power, performance and therefore experience. By the time I do get an iMac it will probably be delivered with, or shortly have loaded on it, OS X Leopard, a change I cannot yet fully comprehend given how little we know about it. All in all I think the next 18 months will be even more exciting and fun. I will, of course, keep you well informed.